The amount of data to be handled by an IT system is rapidly increasing, and a storage system that can deal with it is required. As such a storage system, there is a distributed storage system technology in which a plurality of storage devices (including servers) are connected by a network to create a storage pool, and data is distributed, processed, and stored. This provides scalable capacity and performance.
An example of a distributed storage system is disclosed in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,546,342. Specifically, as described in the abstract, the following configuration is disclosed. A relative importance for each file associated with a web site is calculated. The relative importance is used to calculate a plurality of subsets of content which are distributed to a plurality of devices within a computer cluster, such as a server array, a peer-to-peer network, and the like. The subsets can include coded messages created using an erasure coding scheme on packets containing portions of one or more files. Upon retrieving a file, a fixed number of distinct coded messages are retrieved from the devices based on the erasure coding scheme. The file is re-created with these messages.